How to Adult
Rev. Dougals Taylor
April 26, 2026
Sermon Video: https://youtu.be/Ybsp_eg2MMc

I love how in the English language you can “verb” a word that would normally be a noun if you try hard enough. Do you remember being ‘wanded’ at the airport? Or how you can ‘friend’ me on social media? It’s not a new phenomenon. We ‘table’ discussions and ‘pencil’ each other in. You can ‘butter’ your toast while you ‘voice’ your opinion on this. This morning, I am curious about what goes into the act of “Adulting.” 

If you are unfamiliar with this ‘verbing’ of the word ‘adult,’ allow me to reveal its meaning. There is an old Peanuts cartoon (1972) in which Charlie Brown is talking with Peppermint Patty. https://jerz.setonhill.edu/blog/2023/02/14/security-is-sleeping-in-the-back-seat-of-the-car/#jp-carousel-35790

She says, “Lately everything seems to bother me …”
“How do you mean?” he asks.
“What do you think security is, Chuck?”
“Security?” He thinks about it. “Security is sleeping in the back seat of the car. When you’re a little kid and you’ve been somewhere with your mom and dad, and it’s night and you’re riding home in the car, you can sleep in the back seat. You don’t have to worry about anything. You’re mom and dad are in the front seat, and they do all the worrying … they take care of everything.”
“That’s real neat,” Peppermint Patty is smiling thinking about that feeling.
“But it doesn’t last!” Charlie Brown warns. “Suddenly you’re grown up and it can never be that way again. Suddenly it’s over and you’ll never get to sleep in the back seat again! Never!”
“Never?” She asks.
“Absolutely never.”
“Hold my hand, Chuck!”
Ah, classic comic strips. Sometimes light on the laughs but always ready for some poignant social commentary.

Adulting, according to Peanuts, means you have to do all the worrying now. People might say “I’m done adulting for the day” when they’ve had a particularly hard task they had to do that earlier that day. Adulting is about being responsible, about doing things that have to get done, usually unpleasant things like car repairs, taxes, and getting yourself to the dentist – all while the world around us feel like its on fire. That added layer of context is important. ‘Adulting’ as I’m hearing the term used, is about coming to terms with the reality of global climate degradation, war, Fascism, human trafficking, political corruption, and corporate greed, … all while doing the laundry and making the grocery list. Adulting is about doing all the things we need to do while everything else is also going on. You have to do all the worrying now.

And the current generation feels this more pressingly than previous generations with the way our media and information is always available in our lives. There is so much to worry about! The news was not so much in our faces two generations back. So ‘adulting’ is certainly about managing responsibilities and obligations, but this piece about also having to do all as the world seems to be on fire is an important nuance to it all.

This week I was up at a retreat with my clergy and religious educator colleagues, and over lunch I asked several of them about my sermon topic. I told them my title and asked, “What do you think I should say to them?” One colleague really emphasized this piece around the feeling of global anxiety. This younger colleague really wanted me to hear how her generation can’t get away from the pile-on of crises happening around us.

Another colleague recommended I pause mid-sermon and let us all howl for a bit. Because adulting is hard. (Awoooo!) A modern, playful version of biblical lament, perhaps, about all the things! (Awoooo!) Howling is a little outlet for the anxiety.

Yet another colleague framed their response around learning better regulation techniques. They said being an adult means you have to do your own regulation of your nervous system. This point tied in with what I was planning to say already but filled in a piece I had been missing until this colleague mentioned it. Perhaps ‘adulting’ is about learning to regulate your nervous system in the face of everything you are responsible for now.

Perhaps it’s not really about the errands and the chores and the decisions we need to make as adults. It’s about managing all those adulting obligations while also navigating fear and loss, managing the ebb and flow of friendships, dealing with anxiety – your own and that of others. “Being the one responsible for all the worrying” is about learning to regulate your nervous system.

This the ‘adulting’ task that caught my interest. Learning to regulate is foundational to dealing with all the other, mundane adult tasks like filling out extra forms for the doctor’s visit, or paying off a parking ticket, or dealing with growing personal debt.

In keeping with the analysis offered by Charles Shulz, we need security. The opening question in the comic about being able to fall asleep in the back seat is about security. Being an adult is not only about providing that feeling of security for our children; it’s about having that security for ourselves. And I hear from a lot of young adults that they are scrambling, which does not signal a feeling of security.

The economy features strongly in this scrambling people describe to me. One article I read talks about “the insecurity produced by the gigification of labor, AI-driven job loss, and algorithmic scheduling” as a reality blocking the generation of young adults from attaining a financial foothold into the stability we normally associate with adulthood. (From May 2026 Christian Century article “Has Worship become a Luxury Good?”) 

The usual benchmarks of adulthood and financial security are things like getting married, starting a family, graduating with a degree in your field, beginning a career that will last 40 or more years, buying a home: These milestones are less attainable for today’s young adults. And that’s something people might want to howl about.

It is hard to really feel like you’ve entered adulthood when you are still in a transitional space in your life. And you may not be personally feeling this but you probably know someone who is, or you’re feeling something related. And I’ll note that many elders are feeling this economic phenomenon when they don’t feel secure enough to retire. For elders, it’s not the same conversation as ‘adulting.’ It plays differently but I think it’s rooted in the same overarching economic and social context. This may simply be what it feels like to be regular people experiencing the decline of an empire in real time.

And before we fall into despair, allow me to say some more about how we need to learn to regulate our nervous systems as adults. Because the premise is that we need to all get better at self-regulating. The premise is that ‘being an adult’ means we can’t fall asleep in the backseat anymore.

But what if that’s not true? What if adulting doesn’t have to be imaged as a solo act? I do agree that self-regulation is a key feature of adulting. You do need to figure out how to keep yourself grounded, doing the things that need to get done. Yes. But what if that doesn’t mean we have to give up on co-regulating?

My colleague (… and let me pause for a moment and point out how often in this sermon I’ve said that I found wisdom from a colleague – I’m not relying only on my own adult brain to bring today’s message! …) My colleague George Tyger shared this reflection recently on this point of regulating our nervous systems:

Self-regulation is important, but co-regulation is imperative.
Why is co-regulation is so important:
it creates safety before insight
It reduces threat and shame
it helps the body come out of survival mode
it teaches regulation through lived experience, not just instruction
it protects connection when distress would otherwise turn into rupture
When the nervous system is in distress, either in flight mode or shutdown, We don’t need a lesson on coping skills. We need a grounded human being to be with us, attuned to us. Individual skills work if the nervous system is no longer drowning.
We do not learn calm alone. We learn it in the presence of calm.

Which means, maybe some of the anxiety baked into the idea of adulting – the part that says we have to do all the worrying on our own now – maybe that part is a lie. Maybe, like Peppermint Patty at the end of the Peanuts comic, we can reach out and ask Chuck to hold our hand.

And here is why this is a sermon instead of a ted-talk that happens to be on a Sunday morning: a significant part of what we do in Unitarian Universalism is build community together around shared values. We gather on Sunday mornings and sing together, we hold silence together, we share food and conversation together after the service – which are all practices that allow co-regulation to be happening for people.

I know that no everyone has friends around them that can help calm that anxiety – but that’s what places like this congregation are for. We help each other grow in maturity. Growing is not something people are meant to do alone.

I have always enjoyed the quote from A Powel Davies who said the work of the church is to help people grow a soul. Davies was talking about developing our personal moral compass and critical thinking skills; he was talking about deepening our capacity for empathy and compassion. ‘Growing a soul’ is done in community.

I suggest this is also what we need to make ‘adulting’ easier. We need communities in which we can learn to be calm; in which we can co-regulate together in the face of the world’s atrocities; in which we can, at times, carry each other.

It is a lie that says we have to carry all this alone. We can support each other; we need to support each other and to be supported. That’s how we grow. That’s how we live. That’s what it means to be a mature adult. We do this together.

Hold my hand, Chuck.

In a world without end
May it be so